We’ve all said it and we’ve all heard it. “Oh, I love to bake, but I just can’t because then I’d eat it all.” Well, can it. Cookies are the perfect baking project. They’re a blank canvas for tons of different flavors and are easily transported out of your home to pretty much anywhere people want cookies (like the office).
These chocolate chip cookies are not too sweet or overpowering, with a great richness from the semisweet chips, a spicy hint of fall flavors, and just enough sweetness to remind you that you’re indulging.
I’ll come clean, though. I only brought half of my pumpkin chocolate chip cookie batch to the office. The rest are waiting for me at home, calling out to me.
Click here to see Cookie Swap with the Food Network.
Click here to see the Not Just for Carving: 8 Pumpkin Recipes story.

The cookie will be as good as the chocolate you use to make them, so I recommend purchasing a couverture 64-percent cocoa paste chocolate. Vahlrona, Cocoa Barry, Felchlin, and Dagoba are all great brands to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

There is much debate about what makes the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Once I realized I would never make everyone happy, I created a version that exemplified my favorite cookie characteristics: small, crisp, buttery, crunchy. The ground oats and walnuts give the cookie its delightful crumbly texture.
While many bakeries make an oversized chocolate chip cookie, the Miette cookie is defiantly small. We couldn’t scale the recipe to make fewer, so this recipe makes 13 dozen small Miette-sized cookies and two and a half dozen “normal” 5-inch cookies

In my house, baking cookies was a cutthroat competition among siblings, with my mother presiding, Iron Chef style, with one baby perched on her hip and the other clamped to her knee. Our approaches varied. Mary increased the sugar in an attempt to up the crunch. Patrick (ever the psycho perfectionist) altered the recipe and portion size teaspoon by teaspoon in pursuit of a product with Mom's thin and crispy edges. Bill made his backward, just to act rad. It was never my intention to upstage your cookies, Mom — but you should know that I've never claimed a victory as great as when you tasted your first Babycakes NYC cookie and said: "These are better than mine." Slather an exceedingly generous dollop of your favorite frosting between two of these cookies and you've got your newest addiction, the Babycakes NYC cookie sandwich. Try freezing them.

Have you been eating twice as much chocolate now that studies have shown conclusively that this miraculous bean is actually good for you? It’s certainly more appealing than gulping down a $7 wheatgrass shot with the rest of the aerobics squad at the health-food store. Here, then, is BabyCakes NYC’s ode to cocoa: A tried-and-true chocolate-worshiping recipe with crunchy edges and a soft, chewy center that will put you in antioxidant overdrive. Bonus tip: If you add minced fresh mint to the dough, the cookies taste just like Girl Scout Thin Mints! So here’s to putting those overachieving little nerdlettes out of business. (Oh, relax. Love, love you gals!)

Chocolate Chip Cookie Shopping Tips

There are so many varieties of chocolate on the shelves today it can be overwhelming to pick one – as a general rule of thumb, the fewer the ingredients, the better the chocolate.

Chocolate Chip Cookie Cooking Tips

Think beyond cakes and pies – fruits like peaches, pineapple, and figs are excellent grilled – brush with melted butter or wine and sprinkle with sugar and spices for a dessert that you can feel good about.